uh….

any one besides me feeling de javu all over again?

heard that somewhere before… ah, right, F/A/B-111.

You’re comparing Sixties technology with today’s – there was no such thing as relaxed stability ‘fly-by-wire’ in the F-111’s day.

I’ve seen it written somewere, that the F-16 has better endurance, range than an F-15. The F-16 carries less fuel but burns at exactly half the rate, compared the F-15…

F-35 over-engineered? It might be a complicated aircraft, but it is doing the job normally given to 3 different aircraft designs, so on the whole, it’s actually simplifying things and making things more cost effective…

How about Tu-160 as an over-engineered plane? what can it do that the simpler, cheaper Tu-95 can’t do?

e.g.
1. USSR design philosophies meant uncomplicated or agricultural systems were required so that they could be understood by “tractor mechanics” and operated from a field in the middle of no-where.

That’s something of a stereotype of Soviet engineering – do you regard Tu-160, MiG-31, S-300 or Akula class submarine as “agricultural engineering”?:confused:

Sorry
ie none of them was equipped with MAWS, which basically makes AMRAAM worthless at BVR.
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2009/01/bvr-and-russian-roulette.html

Does that include all radar-guided anti-aircraft missiles – will S-400 be rendered impotent by MAWs and other EW?

Some people understand that perfectly, but also know that the best tactical conditions for the VPAF were worse than anything the USAF has faced since 1942. A comparison with Korea is revealing.

Generally that’s why countries and armies loose wars, because the’re at a disadvantage – ultimately, it would explain why the North Vietnamese essentially lost the air war at least. I wasn’t trying to say that the F-105 was a brilliant dogfighter, just trying to bring in some background to the subject.
The subject does make me reflect upon how so few fighter aircraft were originally designed for “dogfighting”. Until the introduction of the Typhoon, I don’t think the RAF has had a fighter that was designed for close fighting since the 1950s – even the Hunter must have been designed first and foremost to shoot down bombers, that’s what the heavy gun armament was for, and the same could even be said for the MiG-15 and ’17’, with their single 37 and two 23 mm guns

For a definition of an over-engineered aircraft i guess we’ed have to say it’s any aircraft whose role or appointed mission could be replaced by a cheaper aircraft, both in purchase price, and in operational costs.

Quite on the contrary, for me the MiG-25 is a classic example of a purposefully engineered aircraft – the exact opposite of over-engineering. Quite frankly, who else could design a M3.0 aircraft cheap and rugged enough to be operated even by countries like Algeria, Azerbaijan, Syria or Libya?

There was nothing that those Arab countries needed in air defence that the cheaper and less complicated MiG-21 or Mirage F1 could have done instead of the MiG-25 could do.
Foxbat – cheap? rugged? really…:rolleyes: